Wednesday, 18 January 2017

All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

From the title, you might mistakenly assume Rebecca
Traister’s “All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an
Independent Nation” is a self-help tome or maybe a biography of Beyoncé, but
it’s actually a well-written and engaging history of the women’s liberation
movement in the United States.

Traister’s shorter journalistic pieces have appeared in the
New York Observer, New York Magazine and on Salon.com among others, and she is
an award-winning non-fiction writer. “All the Single Ladies” is a
well-researched analysis of the women’s movement and how it has shifted from
the 19th century until now. She examines the history, detailing the
stories of abolitionists, female authors, suffragettes and royalty. Single
women, long an uncomfortable threat to the status quo, were portrayed as
unhappy, promiscuous, and otherwise lacking- Traister aims to highlight how,
culturally, these women are now beginning to be seen as powerful in their own
right.

Traister writes both analytically and personally,
interspersing history and personal anecdotes. She herself only married at 35
years old, and lived independently in New York until then. She interviews academics
and bloggers, social scientists and teachers, married women and single women,
and these women discuss their relationships, breakups, female friendships and
financial situations. The result is a book that is analytical and informative,
yet still maintains an accessible voice. Most importantly, she addresses that
not every woman has the same experience; issues of race, location, class, and
sexual orientation are all factors in how a person experiences their own
singleness.

Chapter Four (brilliantly titled: Dangerous as Lucifer Matches: The Friendships of Women) was
especially poignant for me. In popular culture, women can often be shown
viciously pitted against each other. This chapter, celebrating female
friendships, could have been an entire book on its own – tracing best
friendship between women from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to “The
Mary Tyler Moore Show”’s Mary and Rhoda. Not all women require a romantic
partner to be their closest friend, some maintain close relationships with other
women, and this chapter does a great job of exploring why.

I ended up buying a copy of this book for my (married) best
friend. It’s intelligent without being overly academic, relatable without being
slipshod, and it reminds readers that single and coupled life can both offer a
myriad of options.